Bryan Alexander’s latest book, Peak Higher Ed, is meant to spur discussion about possible futures for higher education after the enrollment peak of 2011. It isn’t so much a set of predictions as a set of questions. I came away with some of my own.
Alexander is a futurist with a specialty in higher ed. He hosts a well-regarded podcast (on which I was once a guest, many years ago), and has published a couple of earlier books focused on specific challenges like climate change. This one reads like the culmination of a trilogy. Although he doesn’t use the term, it comes with its own theories of history.
Drawing on the work of other futurists, Alexander sketches out four possible scenarios: growth, collapse, discipline and transform. Broadly speaking, he identifies the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first as exemplifying growth. Growth describes enrollment, of course, but also the pace of technological and economic advancement that was, in part, enabled by the growth of higher education. (The first community college, Joliet Junior College, was founded in 1901, starting a chain reaction of institutional growth that peaked in the 1960s.) As new populations came into higher education through the GI Bill, coeducation and integration, colleges and universities grew to accommodate them.
Since the peak, though, the situation has changed. In the last decade, more colleges have merged and closed than opened, and many that remain open are working with fewer resources than before. The exceptions, inevitably, are at the top of the prestige hierarchy; Compass Direction State may be on its second or third round of retrenchments, but Ivy U is humming right along. Alexander takes as his central question where we should go from here. OK, demographics aren’t a tailwind anymore, one political party has decided that colleges are wretched hives of scum and villainy, and the college wage premium isn’t what it once was; now what?
That’s where I was hoping for something a bit more concrete. Alexander devotes entire chapters to climate change and AI, but spends relatively little time detailing how colleges actually work. That perspective leads to a far too credulous account of “degrowth” as a strategy. “Degrowth” makes sense at 30,000 feet, but at the campus level, it’s a tough sell. It happens, of course—part of the institutional appeal of a heavily-adjunct faculty is that it enables scaling back without actually requiring layoffs—but as a positive agenda, I can’t think of a single instance of it working. (In his brief discussion of college mergers, Alexander comes close to admitting as much.) It’s not an agenda that attracts either students or donors. It’s a fine line between degrowth and death spiral.
That 30,000 foot perspective comes through in smaller ways, too. On the ground, for instance, it’s obvious that dual enrollment is, at best, a double-edged sword. Its growth has been largely a function of political leaders seeing a budgetary two-fer, paying for one set of classes that counts twice. From an institutional sustainability perspective, it raises fundamental questions about business models. But Alexander breezes past that, blithely assuming that it’s purely positive.
The missing piece in the book, for me, is the driving force. OK, we can diagnose different modes (or moods) for different periods. What drives the change from one to the next? On campus, what makes certain proposals seem almost inevitable and others nearly impossible?& What constitutes the force of gravity that compels nearly every institution in the same direction?
If I were to describe the last few decades of higher education, my story would be of the gradual triumph of the market over literally everything else. A profession that makes the most sense when it’s insulated from short-term market pressures has been pushed, over time, into an ethos of “run it like a business.” True believers in the market are offended by the existence of spaces outside of it, and attack those spaces as havens of apostates. Public disinvestment in public higher education has gone from shocking to controversial to a seeming fact of life. Now, it’s normal to judge a program or an institution on its ROI above all else, or to pit public institutions against each other in a sort of Hunger Games.
If that’s what’s driving change, then the direction of change becomes more legible. Wealth becomes ever more concentrated in a few hands, which are then empowered to set the terms by which everyone else plays. The humanitarian side of public spending is subjected to austerity, the better to afford beefing up the enforcement side of public spending. The conflicts of interest that insulation from the market was supposed to prevent instead become normalized; rather than worrying about grade inflation and academic rigor, we judge colleges on graduation rates and call that “performance.”
“Market discipline” decides which academic disciplines get resources. (In my world, we call that “alignment with employer needs.”) Billionaires like Mark Andreessen attack professors as elitists; that’s both absurd on its face and symptomatic of a worldview. Professors don’t have more power than billionaires, but their (waning) autonomy from billionaires constitutes a sort of anomaly in a culture that’s otherwise fawningly deferential to extreme wealth. The wealthy find that anomaly offensive, and reach for whatever rhetorical tool is at hand to bring the professors to heel.
That’s one theory of what is driving change. There are others. The book needs one.
By focusing on what drives change, it’s easier to outline where growth is likely to happen and where decline is harder to stop. The “K-shaped” economy works its logic through many sectors, including higher ed.
I don’t see the final triumph of the market as inevitable, because “inevitable” is such a strong word. But marketization is powerful enough that ignoring it feels otherworldly. In a context in which the logic that benefits the folks at the top is pushed into every sector of society, what should people who value other things—history, art, a sense of shared humanity—do? That’s the book I was hoping to read. That said, if the point was to generate questions, Alexander has more than hit his target.